"Louisiana must strengthen rules over the release of ozone-creating nitrogen oxide air emissions by industries in the Baton Rouge area during startups, shutdowns and malfunctions, or the federal Environmental Protection Agency will write and enforce its own rules, the agency announced this week."
"A new study from Oregon State University estimates that wildfire and drought caused $11.2 billion in economic losses to privately owned timberland in California, Oregon and Washington over the past two decades."
"Interior Secretary Deb Haaland announced Wednesday that the National Park Service is launching an initiative with Native American tribes to tell “a more complete story of American history” at the country’s 428 national park sites."
"The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Friday warned clinicians and the public about an outbreak of a rare but deadly tick-borne disease that hospitalized five patients in Southern California, killing three of them, after they traveled to or lived in a Mexican border city in recent months."
"Over the next two decades, Los Angeles County will collect billions more gallons in water from local sources, especially storm and reclaimed water, shifting from its reliance on other region’s water supplies as the effects of climate change make such efforts less reliable and more expensive."
"The next United Nations climate change summit appears set to take place in Azerbaijan, a spokesman for the country said Saturday, resolving a bitter, monthslong political standoff over which nation should host the talks in 2024."
"The president of the COP28 climate summit on Sunday urged negotiators to work harder to find consensus on a proposed first-of-its-kind deal to phase out the world's use of fossil fuels, as the two-week conference entered its final stage."
While government censorship may worry journalists, so should self-censorship. That’s the warning in this month’s WatchDog Opinion, whether self-censorship’s “chilling effect” is driven by fears of attack, legal or physical, or by distortions in what it means to be fair, a “bothsidesism” usually pushed by one-sided players. But the bottom line, the column argues, is that when the truth is knowable and known, journalists owe it to their audiences to make the call.
The global warming gas methane was much in the news at the start of the just-ended COP28 climate meeting, with a final Biden administration rule to trim releases by the fossil fuel industry. But when it comes to good journalism on the problem, the latest Reporter’s Toolbox spotlights the work of a team of journalism students who used sophisticated satellite data to tell the story of underreported methane flaring at drilling sites.
Advertisement 
